Advogato blog for dayta

29 Jan 2002

Tue, 29 Jan 2002 00:48:34 GMT

Hmmm... long time no post. I guess this is largely because I haven't really worked on much open source stuff lately, or perhaps I've just been antisocial :P
The motivation to code my cool game has kinda fallen away lately, since I've managed to score a games programming job. I dare say I'll get over it soon and start again ;)

I've become increasingly disillusioned with the whole open- source thing. The programs produced are almost universally crap, and lately I've found most tools I want to use have been much better under Win2K.

I think much of the open-source community has kinda missed the point a bit. The single most important feature of open source software, to me, is to be able to fix problems in the program I'm using. Doing this requires a few very important things:

Documentation.

Clearly constructed code.

I don't think I've seen a single open-source project which has those two things. (This isn't to say they don't exist, just that no program I've ever tried to modify has had it.)

The other thing that really puts me off, is that fact that every time I try to install a new program (the latest one was Anjuta2), I lose half a day trying to upgrade all the things required for it to compile. I guess that comes from everyone using unstable libraries all the time. (Unstable library could probably be defined as 'Is installed on a Linux box').

Anyway, that's my rant for today.

28 Feb 2001

Wed, 28 Feb 2001 12:45:41 GMT

X really does suck... I've just finished off some fullscreen patches for NeL (www.nevrax.org), and doing it was pure pain. Whenever you think to yourself 'there should be a call for that' you find out that to do it requires 5 calls, with a branch in the middle somewhere to handle a few different cases. I guess it's the flaw with a general purpose library, and most of my issues are probably due to inexperience with it... but still... ;) Anyhow, done now, patches submitted, all is good. Time to find the next bit to fix.

25 Feb 2001

Sun, 25 Feb 2001 04:19:26 GMT

Oh well, after a bit of a marathon debug session I got the NeL libraries and the sample server/client up and running. Found a few things which I suspect really are bugs (rather than just dodgy setup on my side), so hopefully my fixes will get merged... Seeing as this is an open-source project with the majority of dev coming from a commercial house, be interesting to see how they respond to someone else telling them what they've done wrong ;) In the end the client ended up running at an average of about 8fps, not the speediest... in fact, slow enough that I double checked to make sure I was using accelerated GL libs. A look at the wireframe indicates that it's not doing any spiffy LoD stuff on the landscape, which seems hideously wasteful. Something like a progressive mesh seems in order ;) (Not that it'll affect me much, my first task will be to remove the landscape. Who needs it! Give me space dammit ;))

15 Feb 2001

Thu, 15 Feb 2001 07:16:12 GMT

*whimper* After several hours of trying to resize NTFS, so that I would have to reinstall 10 gigs of apps, partition magic decides to sya it's working... then proceed to hose my drive anyway. Well fuck it. I've had it with windows. I hereby declare the next month windows recovery month. My home pc is staying windows free.

Hmm.. getting sent to Pittsburgh next month too.. time to get meself a passport ;)

14 Feb 2001

Wed, 14 Feb 2001 05:19:35 GMT

Hmm.. NTFS doesn't want to resize.. someone really needs to write a free app to do this.... one that I can fix instead of getting a stupid 'Unable to write batch file' message. What batch file? Where are you trying to write it? Why in fact, does a batch file need to be written? All questions I'd love to know the answer to. Maybe I should just buy an extra hard drive.

12 Feb 2001

Mon, 12 Feb 2001 02:52:20 GMT

Well, got bored so I've decided to play around with advogato

Guess this means I should start playing with free software stuff again, which was gonna happen since I've decided to abandon winblows as my game platform. All the free engines i've tried suck ass, so I'll just write my own. After about an hour of playing with windows setup stuff, decided the chances of me using it was pretty darn close to my chances of winning the lottery, and used SDL. At this point, it occurred to me that my code would compile under linux with about 3 lines of changes, and probably run faster. And.. like... wow.. I could.. like.. debug with printf. Windows programming sucks.

Now i just need to go burn some debian cds.